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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Bleah!

One lunch hour shot to blazes.

Decided I would make a dash to Wendy's and get a salad and coke to go with my homemade lasagna (made with low-carb noodles). Easy task anywhere but Round Rock.

This town's traffic flow was designed by someone who was either dropping acid or had a massive head injury. If you think Houston or Dallas or Austin is bad, traffic-wise, you ain't seen nothing until you try to negotiate the access roads in Round Rock. There's too many people trying to navigate through very small traffic pipes. Think trying to push thick gravy through a tiny straw.

All the lights on all the access roads are red for impossibly long times and green for as long as it takes to blink your eyes. At Hester's Crossing, the situation has been made that much worse due to it being the last free exit you can take to Loop 1 before the toll road.

That being said, I've learned a few coping mechanisms to get to where I'm going and back without too much stress. Unfortunately I had never tried to get to Wendy's before and even though I followed the signs, I ended up missing the correct driveway and instead ended up going into an exit only driveway that belonged to the neighboring hotel, snaking my way around through the hotel parking lot and attempting to exit at a point where there was a dead end that was causing all the traffic to have to drive around a loop and head back out, and then there was one of those impossibly long traffic lights and when I finally got where I could turn left into Wendy's parking lot, the traffic was so backed up I gave it up as a lost cause and headed back toward the office.

All of this took me 20 minutes longer than it should have. I decided I would stop in at McDonald's for a quick drink and fruit snack substitute, and that took another 10 minutes. (There is no quick in this town.)

FINALLY I got back to the office, heated up my lasagna and settled down to eat. And gagged when I took the first swallow from my Diet Coke. It was sweet tea. I HATE sweet tea. I drink tea the way God intended us to - plain, with the possible exception of lemon or lime. I ended up dumping the lot into the sink and refilling my glass with a bottled Diet Coke.